From The Best of Skye, a Hidden Scotland guide

Kinloch Lodge: A Place to Come Back To

The Macdonalds’ old hunting lodge on Sleat, now a country hotel.

Words by Hidden Scotland

Printed in The Best of Skye, a Hidden Scotland guidebook.

Once the Macdonald family’s ancestral hunting lodge, Kinloch is now a country hotel on the quiet Sleat Peninsula, shaped by nature, heritage and homegrown hospitality. At the helm is Isabella Macdonald, who grew up here and returned to run it—welcoming guests much as she once welcomed old friends to the house.

On the southern edge of Skye, where the roads begin to narrow and the woodland reaches down to the loch, Kinloch Lodge sits quietly among the trees. White-walled and low-set, it is a house with history rather than grandeur, with the mountains behind it and the sea in front.

“Kinloch Lodge was, quite simply, my childhood home,” says Isabella Macdonald of the 17th-century Clan Macdonald hunting lodge on the Sleat Peninsula, a beacon of white in a wooded loch-side wilderness. Thirty years later, after working in London and Edinburgh, she now manages the hotel that her parents set up in 1972. As a child she helped with check-ins between “all sorts of other adventures”; now she likes to welcome guests “as if old family friends”.

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